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Eva Galperin

A lifelong geek, Eva misspent her youth working as a Systems Administrator all over Silicon Valley. Since then, she has seen the error of her ways and earned degrees in Political Science and International Relations from SFSU. She comes to EFF from the US-China Policy Institute, where she researched Chinese energy policy, helped to organize conferences, and attempted to make use of her rudimentary Mandarin skills. Her interests include aerials, rock climbing, opera, and not being paged at 3 o'clock in the morning because the mail server is down.

In the Ethiopian community, bloggers, journalists, and activists are all targets of increasing levels of surveillance and intimidation. The Ethiopian government has used its monopoly on telecommunications to restrict its citizens rights to privacy and freedom of expression. The websites of opposition parties, independent media sites, blogs, and several international media outlets are routinely blocked by government censors and radio and television stations are routinely jammed.

In 2012, when Twitter announced in a blog post that it was launching a system that would allow the company to take down content on a country-by-country basis—as opposed to taking it down across the entire Twitter network—EFF defended that decision as the least terrible option.

In Mexico City last week, protestors formed a human chain to demonstrate their opposition to Ley de Telecomunicaciones y Radiodifusión, the telecommunications and broadcasting law that President Enrique Peña Nieto introduced at the end of March.

Rumors of the extent of Ethiopia’s digital surveillance and censorship state have echoed around the information security community for years. Journalists such as Eskinder Nega have spoken of being shown text messages, printouts of emails, and recordings of their own telephone conversations by the Ethiopian security services.

Russia's government has escalated its use of its Internet censorship law to target news sites, bloggers, and politicians under the slimmest excuse of preventing unauthorized protests and enforcing house arrest regulations. Today, the country's ISPs have received orders to block a list of major news sites and system administrators have been instructed to take the servers providing the content offline.

UPDATE 2/18/14: After a four-hour trial, Le Quoc Quan's sentence was upheld today. It took 30 minutes for the jury to reach a verdict. EFF condemns this verdict and continues to call for his immediate release.